Cormorants, Churchill, and Life

Birds are meant to fly, but some also swim. They mix it up in a medium that is different from air, different from managing gravity on a tree branch. Daring in a way, they do it by instinct – but also by decision-making and incredible effort. We miss chances to learn from nature, including from birds.

Often, where I live, bald eagles circle on thermals, occasionally resting in a tall pine, sitting a while, surveying all they see, looking – as often as not – right to the bottom of the lake, for fish.

Like the diving osprey, also common, and kingfishers, no bigger than a robin but clever – diving only when the sun is not behind them, so fish miss their shadow – eagles dive, recover, and fly off with a fish.

All three birds are as comfortable on water as a branch, soaring, or nesting. Loons go further, living in the water, minimally on land. Their young don’t hit land for two years. Born waterbirds, they are unusual, go back to when dinosaurs roamed, their haunting call a billion-year “message in a bottle.”

But this morning, drinking strong coffee at dawn, a lone cormorant caught my eye. On flat water, not a ripple to be seen, he labored, struggled, working with all his might … to get off the water.

With each forward push of his invisible, webbed engine, underwater horsepower, his wingtips slapped the water, not a dozen times, but two dozen, more until airborne, like an overloaded plane.

Turns out, cormorants, in this case Maine’s slender, double-crested cormorant, are just very, very inefficient. They are great divers, fishers, and swimmers, and like to dry their wings outstretched, but they are not good at getting off the water. Yet, they do it, again and again, with no loss of enthusiasm.

Thinking about it, I wondered at these cormorants. They know instinctively life is hard, and will be again today, dropping from a tree branch or rock into the water – fishing – then struggling again into the air.

They know they are not good at getting airborne, have a tough row to hoe, and yet never hesitate. I hear you, you are right: They were born to it, do not know what they do not know, how others fly.

Fair enough. You say, and you are right, on some days they fail on their first attempt, fail on their second, and third, held back by strong wind and waves in the face. Getting up is nearly impossible.

True. Yet, if you watch, they never stop trying, no matter how tired. Even on a calm morning, like this one, their mission is hard. Getting airborne is a monstrous labor, many slaps before they are up.

Ornithologists marvel at birds like cormorants, since “a wing designed for optimal diving … leads to enormous energy costs when flying,” and even getting off the water. In time, similar costs grounded the penguin, which effectively gave up the power to fly.

So, what is the lesson? Maybe one we all know instinctively, but which the cormorant – who has the worst ratio of effort to outcome in getting off the water, worse than loons, quietly teaches us.

Cormorants, like the one I saw laboring this morning without hesitation, believing he could do it, no looking back, remind us of an approach to life we easily forget – yet, without which, extinction.

To mind come the words of Winston Churchill, who failed at everything until he saved the Western world. “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Exactly right.

So, better it is, for sure – when the effort to get airborne is needed – to follow the cormorant, not the penguin, ostrich, or Great Auk (now gone). Better to labor, struggle, and talk, than give up at dawn. 

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.